Good evening, everyone:

My plans are to take off for a vacation this evening and, although I am tempted otherwise, to suspend my nightly notes until I get back in a couple of weeks. For some of you, blessed relief. For others . . . . well, just a break. I accordingly thought I might send along something a bit out of the norm as I step out the door: a reflection on King Charles III. Because this is the last you’ll hear from me for a while, the note is more than a bit indulgent – long enough to take up a couple of sittings.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to try to build on the enormous outpouring of appreciation for Queen Elizabeth II’s historic service to her country . . . to enter into the conversation about whether the British monarchy’s shelf-life should be time-stamped . . . to recapitulate the swirls of drama surrounding the rifts between William and Harry, the unsavory intrigue in the royal court over Megan, and – the ultimate unpleasantness – the tragic denouement of the relationship between Prince Charles and Princess Dianna.

I wanted instead to offer just a few reflections on the new King. Utterly presumptuous, I realize – forgive me. But I’ve had the unusual pleasure of spending time with the Prince of Wales on four different occasions. Those experiences suggest a leader of uncommon principle, intellect, vision, and skill and raise the question of just how much of those qualities and beliefs will carry over to his tenure as King.

Part I: A Meeting at Highgrove

My first meeting with His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales was in 2004 at his Highgrove estate in Tetbury.

The Prince had invited Robert Davis, the developer of Seaside in Florida, the nation’s first “new urbanist” planned community and the chair of the Congress for New Urbanism, to bring 15 of his colleagues to visit Highgrove to discuss town planning and sustainable urban development.

I joined the group, which included Jonathan Rose (whose mixed-income, mixed-use development company is a grantee of Kresge), Andres Duany (arguably the nation’s premier new urbanist town planner), Shelley Poticha (CEO of the Congress for New Urbanism, who would go on to run the Obama Administration’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities), Harriet Tregoning (who would become the director of Planning for Washington, D.C., and who now leads the Urban Mobility Alliance), Hank Ditmar (the chief drafter of the pathbreaking Surface Transportation Act, which re-engineered federal transportation policies, and later the CEO of Reconnecting America), and others.

As we waited in the reception area of the Highgrove meeting room, we noticed paintings and watercolors lining the walls – quite accomplished, they had been done by the Prince.

The Prince’s staff was adamant about a number of things. We should not make physical contact. We should expect only a half-hour. We should steer clear of controversial issues.

When the Prince came in shortly afterward, all three rules flew out the window.

He gave a talk that lasted forty-five minutes – a brilliantly constructed weave of personal philosophy, a history of “royal politics,” and a nuanced canvass of half-a-dozen policy areas. He articulated a suite of principles about sustainability, environmental protection, and the role of nature in a commercialized, industrialized world that informed his approach to holistic medicine, gardening (he does much of his own garden design and planting at Highgrove), organic food and sustainable agricultural practices, climate change, planning, design, and other topics. He talked about the 500-year history of the power politics of the court – in which every word uttered by the family was scrubbed controversy-free by the court’s guardians – tracing it back to Medieval times. He smiled as he explained that that was why he would appreciate our keeping what he was about to say out of emails or newspaper interviews.

To the obvious frustration of his handlers, he then sat with us for another hour-and-a-half talking about how his experiences resonated with the gnarly issues we in the United States urban planning and practice community were wrestling with – zoning, design standards, mixed-used development, sustainable development practices, and public housing and transportation policy.

And he was careful to then thank each of us individually for coming, shaking hands and asking about our work. I had learned earlier that one of the reasons he had asked for this particular guest-list was that Shelly, Harriet, and Hank were the three finalists the Prince had selected to lead the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community (i.e., the built environment). He asked my impressions of all three, and we talked for five or six minutes about their very different forms of expertise and skill. He ultimately chose Hank, who would serve the Prince for eight years.

The Prince took his leave, and his chief gardener gave us a tour of the extraordinary gardens:

Part II: Poundbury

The Prince arranged for a tour the next day of Poundbury, a planned community created by the Prince on the outskirts of Dorchester within the Prince’s Duchy of Cornwall.

The Prince had a number of years previous asked the European planner and architect Leon Krier – an iconoclastic member of the Congress for New Urbanism – to design a planned community for some 6,000 residents and 200 businesses. The Prince explained to us his intention to create an antidote to suburban planning by integrating shops, businesses, market-rate housing, low-income housing (35%), an orientation to walking, and an explicit goal of carbon neutrality.

 Krier, who led us on the tour, and Andres Duany were particularly focused on what Duany called the “environmental transect” – a seam that preserves the integrity of open space, while connecting it directly to the identity of the town. The Prince and Krier wanted Poundbury to cast in bright relief the distinctiveness of urban and rural ecosystems, but also to create a continuum in which the man-made environment gradually gives way to, and incorporates, the natural environment, and vice versa.

Part III: Sustainable Architecture

My second and third meetings with the Prince focused on sustainable agriculture.

The Prince had invited a group of American nonprofit and foundation representatives to Tetbury to visit the Prince’s Duchy Home Farm, one of Britain’s largest organic farms. Covering more than 135,000 acres, it is dedicated to sustainable agriculture, humane livestock husbandry, and native-plant gene preservation. The Prince spoke with us about practices on his own lands – which we toured – and described how very difficult it is to equip small farmers (“smallholders”) with the policy and finance tools they need in order to thrive.

He was particularly interested in whether and in what form progress had been made in the United States in casting light on the dangers of conventional farming practices, in overcoming the persistence of perverse economic incentives for industrialized agriculture, and in advancing holistic, organic farming practices. At the end of the conversation, it was suggested that we form a network that might explore cross-learnings and experiences between Britain and the United States.

That led to a number of meetings with the Prince’s staff to get that kind of network off the ground. Those, in turn, led to another working session with the Prince after a speech he gave on the subject at Georgetown in 2011.

The effort created a virtual working group that exchanged models, research, and policy ideas for several years, working closely with the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders.

Part IV: Urban Community Development

My fourth encounter was at St. James Palace, where I attended a conference organized by the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community to explore whether it could identify points of connection outside Britain. More than a dozen countries were represented. Hank Ditmar, the Prince’s executive, asked me to talk about whether the Prince’s Foundation’s principles of town planning and development might have application in urban settings in the U.S.

I spoke with Hank and Prince Charles about the possibility of working in smaller cities, particularly in the South and Southeast. We agreed that the complexities of working in larger, industrialized cities would make a cross-walking of experiences quite difficult.

It was an intriguing idea, and Kresge made a small grant to help propel preliminary planning. But it turned out to be just a little too abstract and hard. It died a quiet death.

Part V: From Prince to King

Because of all of this, I can’t help but be intrigued by the extent to which the Prince’s clarity of values, depth of thought, well-formed beliefs, and undisguised passions could possibly translate into the public positions of a King.

The conventional wisdom seems clear: no.

Unlike his mother, who was a human Rorschach test, King Charles will bring to his role a clarity of view formed through decades of speeches, writings, and actions. I’ve touched on only a few, but articles over the last days have highlighted countless others – racial reconciliation, climate change, youth employment, alternative medicine, and on and on. As Charles himself has said, his work over the last forty years could be interpreted by more conservative defenders of the monarchy as “meddling, and prone to challenging accepted wisdom.” But so be it: “If it’s meddling to worry about the inner cities as I did 40 years ago and what was happening or not happening there – the conditions in which people were living – then I’m very proud of it.”

In his inaugural speech, the King made clear that he would leave position-taking and social activism to others. I have absolutely no doubt that he will be true to his word and that he will reign with dignity and restraint. It seems right that some form of political neutrality comes with the job.

But . . . . . . . . . . there is a part of me that wishes that things could be just a little more nuanced and complex. It would certainly seem possible that a King could convene in ways that would preserve his neutrality, but create a forum in which weighty issues could be given greater visibility. It doesn’t seem out of the question that this particular King could speak on issues of existential importance – race relations, climate change, urbanization, industrialized agriculture, and so many others – in ways that could avoid specific policy positions. And it would stand to reason that he could simply “show up” in forums of deep importance, adding weight and legitimacy to the social sector, to philanthropy, or to front-line public sector service providers.

Probably a pipedream. But it’s fascinating to imagine what a King with attitude might look like.

Rip

‍